


Dear Ivan

by VinHampton



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:01:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinHampton/pseuds/VinHampton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A letter to Ivan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dear Ivan

Dear Ivan, 

I am reluctant to write you this letter. Because once I have written it, it will have been written. And somehow, that makes it real. Somehow, that means you really are no longer alive. And if you are no longer alive, then there is no conceivable way I can ever see you again. And of course I know all of this; I am under no delusion. The moment you… you know which moment… that was the moment you sealed your own fate, and mine with it. You knew I would not forgive you; you knew there was no way once you did what you did that you and I could possibly have any sort of life together. Not even if I did, by some stretch of the imagination, find it in myself to forgive you. 

I did not expect I would be the one given the assignment to have you removed. That was cruel, even for Yuri. But Yuri is a fiercely jealous man. He said if somebody else did it, I would always bear a grudge against them; I would victimise you. If I did it, then I bore complete responsibility. I would finally end the “fairytale” he had disapproved of for so long. No, that’s wrong. You ended the fairytale. My bullet was simply punctuation. I simply slammed the book shut on the Princess and her Poet. 

And it was not a suggestion; it was an order. It was the last order I would follow, and then I would be free – he would see to it I died and was reborn. “You will be like the Phoenix, Ruby,” he said. “And you will be born of fire. And that which is forged in fire lives forever.”

I am tempted to end this letter here, but then all it will have been is a justification of my actions to you. And that is not what I set out to do. I don’t want to write the rest of this, because I don’t want to remember that you were tender and funny and kind. I don’t want to remember your voice and I don’t want to remember you barefoot in our kitchen, making me poached eggs. I want to remember you with your gun aimed at me because that is the only way I can bury you. But that was only a moment. And we had three years worth of moments. And in every single one of those moments, even in the final one, I loved you. 

I do not think I love you anymore. But I think if I allowed myself, I could love the memory of you. And I feel like that would be a betrayal, on my part, of the man who loves me now. He loves me with his innocence and inexperience. I love him with my world-weariness and that world-weariness is a part of your legacy. His love is not complicated or overshadowed by expectation; my love is needy and neurotic, and that is your fault. I cannot love him in the way he deserves to be loved; instead I have to offer myself broken and glued together. And that is your fault.

And mine. 

You would hate him. He is beautiful. I want to gloat about how beautiful he is, and how clever, and how achingly I love him. I want you to hate him because he is /so/ beautiful.

You were beautiful too, like an insect; esoteric and eastern. You had a way with words; you wielded them like weapons. You were my Poet. I remember our days off, our long, languid afternoons tangling limbs. I remember the way you sipped your wine as though you liked it, because I’d told you once red wine felt like a life force to me. I remember how you played me Chopin in the car and how your fingers would make their way to mine like travellers; how you held my hand while you were driving long stretches of road. I remember that day and night where we did nothing but eat caviar and talk about our childhoods (I will take your secrets to my grave). Russia was cold, but our bed was always warm and welcoming. I fed you strawberries and you made up little rhymes to make me smile. You worshipped me; I have not forgotten that. Sometimes I think you were in love with some idea of me which you had created; you helped me up onto a pedestal that at times felt far too high because I am deeply flawed, fundamentally flawed, and you chose to gloss over that fact. 

I was the woman who men desired, and they could have me, for a price. So you had to come up with other ways to /have/ me as nobody else could. You wrote poems about my freckles, about my dimples, about my breasts, about my fingers.. And you kissed them devotedly as you read to me. You deified me. I do not imagine for one second it was easy for you when I was working. I don’t know if you ever accepted it or if you pretended it wasn’t happening. We never spoke about it. When I was with you I was yours; you told me that was enough. 

In turn, what I loved was your wide-eyed view of the world. You saw it as though it were a stage. What I loved was how you smelled of clean laundry and the pages of old books. What I loved was how natural it felt to be with you, like you had always been a part of me. I do not know whether this was genuine or whether you shaped yourself to fit me. I don’t know which I would prefer. 

No, I don’t think I love you anymore. For the longest time I hated you for wrenching all of this away from me. And that has settled into vague antipathy. You are a closed book and it is too hard to open it up again. I need you buried. But you will be buried inside of me. That, I hate you for. I do not think of you now when I am in bed. But you are there like a whisper I can’t quite hear, or don’t quite want to. It would be easier if you had treated me unkindly. At least for Connor I feel nothing but loathing. But I /loved/ you, deeply, for three /happy/ years I loved you. 

I don’t want to love you anymore. 

I want to exorcise you so I can belong completely to the man I love now. I want you out of my veins, I want you out of my bones. I want to be happy. 

Goodbye.   
Vin


End file.
